Datalanche: PF Open Challenge 1st place

For the final entry in our How I Did It series on the Practice Fusion Open Challenge, we spoke with the winner, Ryan Pedela, the CEO and co-founder of medical info search engine Datalanche ( currently in Private Beta, but you can check it out with the login info provided in his contest submission)

What was your background prior to entering this competition?

Our team at Datalanche has experience and expertise in computer science, computer graphics, gaming, and data science.

What made you decide to enter?

We had already started work on a medical information search engine powered by de-identified patient records. The competition and Practice Fusion’s data set aligned perfectly with our goals. The competition gave us an opportunity to build and test our search engine using a high-quality, real-world data set of 10,000 de-identified patient records.

What preprocessing methods did you use to study the data?

One of our goals is to give users a dynamic, near real-time experience based on their input. This allows them to quickly see how a patient’s demographics, medical history, etc affect any given medical statistic. Practice Fusion’s data set was re-organized so that we could quickly compute statistics based on the user’s input.

We use MedlinePlus Connect, an API from the National Library of Medicine, to provide our users encyclopedia information for every medical topic in our database. The API returns encyclopedia information formatted as HTML, but we needed a different HTML formatting than the one provided. We wrote Python scripts to reformat the encyclopedia information.

How did you decide what aspects of the data to use?

According to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center [1], the most commonly searched medical topics are symptoms, medical conditions, and treatments. We decided to focus on medical conditions and medications since they are commonly searched and a significant percentage of Practice Fusion’s data set was devoted to those medical topics.

We were surprised by the breadth of medical conditions and medications represented in Practice Fusion’s data set given its relatively small size. With only 10,000 patients in the data set, 21 patients had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a rare disease, and some had been treated with interferon, a medication prescribed for treatment of multiple sclerosis. Several other relatively rare medical conditions and medications are also represented in the data set. To us, that shows Practice Fusion’s data set has great coverage for medical conditions and medications.

Which tools did you use?

The website is built with Javascript, HTML5, CSS3 on the client. On the server, we use Node.js for the web server, our relational database is MySQL, and Apache Solr for search. Data preprocessing scripts are written in Python.

What have you taken away from this analysis?

We believe improving everyone's access to reliable medical information will improve health care. Our mission is to find medical correlations, trends, facts or "insights" which can only be found by analyzing large amounts of anonymous medical data, then intuitively showcase those insights. This competition showed us that the medical data necessary to accomplish our mission is available.